Monday, February 6, 2017

‘It is Ever More Difficult to Be an Ethnic Russian in Non-Russian Republics,’ Kashin Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, February 5 – The nationality
issue after receding somewhat in recent years is now the “sharpest” issue in
Russia not only because Russians are being challenged to decide who they are
but because it is becoming ever more difficult for ethnic Russians to live in
the country’s non-Russian republics, according to Moscow commentator Oleg
Kashin.

In the course of his participation
on an Ekho Moskvy talk show, Kashin discussed these problems in far more open
terms than is typically the case, given the risks of criminal charges, and even
hinted at the possibility of the disintegration of the Russian Federation into
several new countries if nothing changes (echo.msk.ru/programs/personalnovash/1920514-echo/).

Indeed, Kashin said, citing the words
of Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, that “Poland was ‘the deformed
child of the Versailles Treaty,” today “Russia also is unfortunately a deformed
child but of the Beloveshchaya Treaty” not only because of the non-Russian
entities within it but because Russians are a divided people just like the
Germans were.

In many ways, the commentator says,
Russians face problems. The Kremlin’s drive to get ethnic Russians to accept a
status as part of a non-ethnic rossiiskaya
nation is a threat because no Chechen will cease to be a Chechen but an ethnic
Russian in such a situation could cease to be an ethnic Russian.

And the country’s current system
means that “today, ethnic Russians, unlike dozens of other ethnoses included in
Russia are deprived of the political representation and statehood which
Buryats, Yakuts, and everyone except the ethnic Russians has because Russia is,
as it is written in the Constitution, a multi-national and multi-confessional
country.”

Inside Russia, Kashin continues, “there
exist some 15 quite harsh ethnocracies, ranging from the Chechen Republic, the
most radical one where an individual by birth in Chechnya receives certain
advantages which a Russian doesn’t have” and where an ethnic Russian cannt hope
to make any sort of career.

“Approximately the same thing albeit
in a softer variant exists in other regions with a titular nation,” he
says.“It is impossible for a Russian to
make a successful career in Tuva, for instance. It is very difficult for a
Russian in Yakutia. Buryatia which is primarily populated by Russians” is the
same.All this, Kashin complains, is “pure
Nazism.”

Asked whether he wanted to turn
things upside down and put Russians in charge of all these places, a situation his
interlocutor pointed out would prompt non-Russians to ask about their rights,
Kashin insists that all he is calling for is equal treatment, because in his
words, “today there are no equal rights” in these places.

And when it was pointed out that there
are few Buryats in the central Russian government, he says that “on the other
hand, “there are Buryats in the tank forces” of the Russian military fighting in
Ukraine. That alone should make all Russian citizens interested in equal
treatment regardless of ethnicity.

A listener from Leningrad oblast
pointed out that if Kashin’s ideas were realized, Russia would fall apart, to
which the commentator responded that “it is difficult for [him] to speak about
that” because of laws that criminalize any talk of secession and because ethnic
Russians remain a divided nation not only within their own country but across
international boundaries.

All this makes even talking about
these things “a dangerous subject.” And therefore. Kashin continues, he will
not speculate on what is coming an, whether Russia is going to fall apart. But
he does say that “no one including Putin in fact knows” how to avoid that even
though the possibility of collapse should have been the subject of discussion
already for many years.